Bipin Rawat’s xenophobia

Let’s face facts

General Bipin Rawat decorated the Major with Chief of Army Staff’s Commendation Card and cited him for bravery. Human Rights Activists were aghast at the atrocity and callous and cold-hearted gesture of the Indian Army Chief but that is General Bipin Rawat for you.

Indian Army Chief General Bipin Rawat has come up with an imaginary threat of 760 Pakistani terrorists poised to launch terror attacks across the LOC. While speaking to the media, at the occasion of the launch of the book “India’s Most Fearless” authored by two defence journalists, Shiv Aroor and Rahul Singh, which covers the so called fictitious “Surgical Strikes” across the LOC into Pakistani territory on 28 September 2016.

The strikes had been launched as retaliation to the false flag operation at Uri on 18 September 2016, in which 19 Indian soldiers had been burnt alive in their tents. Indian media and army had created such a hype denigrating Pakistan that the entire Indian nation was demanding a riposte. To hide appease the masses, Indian army announced that they had launched “surgical strikes” in across the LOC in Pakistani area and destroyed seven alleged terrorist training camps and killed 34 terrorists who were poised to attack India. Since no evidence of the strikes was provided, Indian media and masses were sceptical of the veracity of the claim. Pakistan on the other hand, had facilitated local and foreign media teams to tour the area, who found no traces of any surgical strikes.

The Indian lies were nailed but the obdurate and pathological liars found a new method of consolidating their claims of having actually launched the surgical strikes. By publishing a book! It took them one year to manufacture the details to make them palatable for a gullible Indian nation. Readers may recall that on the eve of the fiftieth anniversary of the 1965 Pakistan-India War, Narendra Modi had directed his Ministry of Defence to rewrite the history, expunge Indian losses and claim false victory.

 History is repeating itself except that accounts are being narrated of an event that never took place. As if to consolidate the false data, with a sense of bravado, General Bipin Rawat declared that surgical strikes on terror launch pads across the LoC could be repeated, if necessary. He claimed that he wanted to send a stern message to Pakistan.

He said cross-border infiltration will continue because camps across the Line of Control, from where terrorists are launched, are still operational, and warned that the Indian Army is ready to “receive” them and keep dispatching them to their graves “two and a half feet under.”

“The strike was a message we wanted to communicate to them and they have understood what we mean…that things could follow up, if required,” Rawat said.

Launching the book on occasion of the first anniversary of the fictitious surgical strikes may have been a good plan only if it were true. The names of the participants have been withheld but on 26 January, India’s Republic Day, the list of medals awarded for the surgical strikes was a giveaway of the true identity of those who are supposed to have executed the surgical strike in their dreams.

The strikes were carried out by the Special Forces of the Army who had crossed the LoC. An unspecified number of terrorists waiting to sneak into India were killed in action by the Indian Army.

When asked what impact did the surgical strikes have, Rawat said, “(It sent a message that) we are a stronger nation capable of taking decisions when time comes.”

Rawat’s predecessor Gen (Retd) Dalbir Singh, who was the Army chief when surgical strikes were carried out, echoed similar views on their impact.

“They had struck well as deterrence and have enhanced India’s image abroad,” Singh said.

When asked about what the difficult part of the surgical strikes was carried out in Azad Jammu Kashmir, Singh said the worrying part was “extricating” the soldiers without any casualty.

When asked about an operation conducted by the Army against NSCN (Khaplang), after they killed 20 soldiers in an assault in Manipur (Myanmar) in 2015, Singh said he took up the matter with the Defence Minister for training the Special Forces for such operations and upgrading their equipment.

Readers may recall that even Myanmar had refuted Indian claims in which they launched a surgical strike and claimed to have eliminated as many as sixty terrorists. General Bipin Rawat is the same army chief, who decorated a war criminal Major Nitin Gogol, who had used an innocent Kashmiri youth as human shield. On 9 April 2017, Major Nitin Gogol tied a Kashmiri youth to the bonnet of his jeep and using the young man as a human shield, drove through the streets of Srinagar. An FIR was registered against the Major, but Nitin Gogol was praised by the Court of Inquiry for “presence of mind to avoid casualties or injuries” while General Bipin Rawat decorated the Major with Chief of Army Staff’s Commendation Card and cited him for bravery. Human Rights Activists were aghast at the atrocity and callous and cold-hearted gesture of the Indian Army Chief but that is General Bipin Rawat for you.

The so called Surgical Strikes on 28 September 2016 were conducted under the stewardship of the previous Indian Army Chief, General Dilbar Singh thus General Bipin Rawat is rearing to have a go at Pakistan so that his bellicosity can pay rich dividends and his jingoism is appeased.

The Kashmir imbroglio is such that sometimes even Pakistani analysts fall into the pitfall of misplaced scrutiny. Former Foreign Secretary Riaz Muhammad Khan, in his 11 September 2017 Op-Ed ‘Kashmir talks: reality & myth’, comments: “Discussions sometimes meander into security considerations or the need to protect water sources, that Kashmir has tied down over half million Indian troops; and that Pakistan must remove an existential threat by securing control of rivers which pass through Kashmir. These are false arguments. Kashmiri sacrifices and suffering must not be viewed through the prism of our security; it will knock out the moral basis of our position, suggesting that we are not interested in a just political settlement. The argument negates the fact that nuclear deterrence is an equaliser which will not be altered even if India doubles its military strength.”

This argument necessitates a counter narrative. The Kashmiri cause is based on humanitarian principles and is a just struggle for liberation. The people of Pakistan identify with the cause of the Kashmiris and would lend moral and diplomatic support to enable them achieve the rights promised by the UN Resolutions on Kashmir.